Ralph Compton Texas Hills

by Ralph Compton

  “The Comanches have struck a dozen or more homesteads. Yours and the Kursts’ and the Weavers’ among them.”

  Icy terror rippled down Owen’s spine. “Philomena?”

  “Safe in town,” Edidiah said.

  Luke brushed past Owen and gripped the trapper by the front of his buckskin shirt. “Mandy and Estelle? What about them?”

  “Safe as well,” Ebidiah said.

  “This old goat is too humble,” the marshal said. “He’s the one who pulled their fat out of the fire. If not for him, they’d have had their throats slit, or worse.”

  “Mrs. Weaver wasn’t as fortunate,” Ebidiah said.

  “Wait a minute,” Wylie said, coming over. “What about our ma? She was home alone, too.”

  The expressions on many of the men gave him his answer.

  “I’m sorry,” Ebidiah said. “I tried to warn her, but the Comanches got there before me.”

  Wylie looked as if he’d been walloped with a hammer. “Ma, too?” he said dazedly. “This gets worse and worse.”

  Lorette uttered a low whine and put a hand to her throat. “No,” she said softly, her eyes glistening. “Not her. She had no backbone, but she was my ma.” Turning, she sank to both knees and Sam put his good arm around her.

  “We took a chance coming after you, and we have to head right back,” the marshal said. “Only half the men in town are left to defend it.”

  “Not even Comanches would attack an entire town,” Owen said.

  “Don’t ever put anything past them,” Ebidiah advised. “When they put their mind to something, they don’t stop this side of Creation.”

  “You heard them, Pa,” Sam said. “Are you going to make me sit here, or can we head back?”

  Owen thought of Philomena and the girls. “As soon as Miss Kurst cleans your wound, we’ll fan the breeze.”

  “What about your cattle?” Ebidiah asked. “We saw where they’d stampeded.”

  “Forget them,” Owen said.

  “After all the trouble you went to?”

  “If I ever see a longhorn again, it will be too soon.”

  “You’re talking nonsense, Pa,” Luke said.

  Maybe he was, Owen mused. After what they’d been through, who could blame him? All those who died, and what did they have to show for it? Nothing. “We nearly died, son.”

  “The ones who did,” Luke rejoined, “did they die for nothing? Mr. and Mrs. Weaver and Reuben? Mr. Kurst and his boys? Because if we give up, that’s what it’ll amount to.”

  “It’s just cattle,” Owen said. “They’re not worth more lives.”

  “No, before they were cattle,” Luke said. “They ran wild and free. Now they have our brand on them. Twenty-five hundred of the critters, just waiting to be taken to market.”

  “There’s not enough of us to make the drive.”

  “We can hire men,” Luke said, “and pay them out of the money we make. I’ll put a notice in the newspaper, and we’ll have more hands than we know what to do with.”

  “I’ll be healed by then and raring to go,” Sam said.

  “And where he goes, I go,” Lorette said.

  Wylie glanced at her and shook his head. “And where she goes, damn it, I go too.”

  Ebidiah Troutman chuckled. “Sounds to me, Mr. Burnett, as if you’ll be making that drive whether you want to or not.”

  “Heaven help us,” Owen said.

  Postscript

  Lorette Kurst married Samuel Burnett two months to the day after the stampede. Her brother Wylie gave her away.

  Owen Burnett hired on eight men and spent six weeks scouring the hills. They gathered up nearly two thousand of the branded longhorns along with another forty-three that needed branding.

  Their cattle drive was the first by settlers, not a rancher. They followed the Chisum Trail, as it was being called. The only incidents of note were when one of their cowboys was bit by a rattlesnake but for some reason no venom was injected into the man’s blood, and later when a small band of Indians asked for three cows to let the herd pass through their territory. Luke wanted to drive the Indians off at the point of his six-shooter, but Owen gave them the cows.

  “I’ve had enough of killing to last me a lifetime,” was how he summed up his sentiments.

  They reached Kansas without losing a man. Or their lone woman.

  The buyers offered forty dollars a head. After Owen paid his hands and split the proceeds with the only two Kursts still breathing—even though, by rights, Lorette was now a Burnett—that left him with almost forty thousand dollars. He gave ten thousand to each of his sons.

  Sam went off to California with Lorette and prospered in the dry goods trade. They came back to Texas once a year, and Owen got to bounce five grandchildren on his knee.

  Luke became a deputy in Kansas and later a lawman in Wyoming. He never shot another living soul.

  Owen and Philomena stayed on their farm. They built that addition she’d dreamed about, and Owen splurged on a carriage to take them to and from town. In their senior years they rocked on their porch every evening and reminisced about the old days.

  Now and then the cattle drive came up. On one occasion Philomena reached over and placed her hand on Owen’s. “Was it worth it, you reckon? All those lives that were lost?”

  “We got a fine daughter-in-law out of it, and enough money that we never have to worry.”

  “Money isn’t important. Family is,” Philomena said. “Don’t you agree?”

  “I always agree with you, dear.”

  Philomena smiled. “If you learned nothing else in life, you learned that, at least.”

  “Every husband does,” Owen said.

  Philomena laughed, and smacked him.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  OUTLAW TOWN

  a Ralph Compton novel by David Robbins

  available in January 2016 from Signet in paperback and e-book.

  “Where the blazes are we?”

  Chancy Gantry gazed out over the sprawling expanse of brown country they were passing through. “That’s a good question.” He tilted his head skyward and squinted at the blazing sun from under his hat brim, but only for a moment. The glare hurt his eyes. “All I can tell you is we’re heading north.”

  “That’s not where, pard,” Oliver Teal said with a grin. “That’s a direction.”

  Chancy grinned. Ollie and he had been partners for going on six years. They were both from San Antonio but that was about the only thing they had in common. Chancy was tall and lanky; Ollie was short and broad. Chancy had straight black hair and brown eyes; Ollie had reddish hair with a lot of little curls, and wide, frank green eyes. Chancy’s chin sort of came to a point; Ollie didn’t have much of a chin at all.

  Their taste in clothes was different, too. Chancy went in for plain work clothes and a hat with a single crease. Ollie liked to wear a brown rawhide vest even in the hottest weather, while his hat had a crease in the center and two more to either side.

  They didn’t tote the same revolvers, either. Chancy was fond of a Remington. Ollie favored a long-barreled Colt.

  “We’re somewhere in Indian Territory,” Chancy clarified.

  “The Injuns can have it,” Ollie said in disgust. “It’s a heap of nothingness no one else would want.”

  “From what I hear, they don’t want it, either,” Chancy said. “The government made them come here.”

  “That’s the government,” Ollie said. “Always telling folks what they should do even when the folks don’t want to do it.”

  Chancy changed the subject before his friend started on his usual rant. Ollie’s pa had been conscripted during the War Between the States, and Ollie, a youngster at the time, had never forgiven the government for taking his pa away even though Ollie had been one of the lucky few in t
hat his pa had made it home in one piece. “Ten days or so and we should be in Kansas.”

  “Addy told me this morning that he heard the trail boss say it was more like fourteen or fifteen days.”

  Chancy couldn’t wait to reach the railhead. Back in Texas the notion of taking a herd north had been exciting. A trek of more than seven hundred miles, with all sorts of dangers along the way. He’d imagined tangling with Comanches, or having to stop a stampede, or running into owlhoots. All sorts of things could have gone wrong. But nothing had. The drive had been as uneventful as a Sunday stroll in a San Antonio park.

  It was Chancy’s first trail drive, and if he had to pick one word to describe it, that word would be “dull.”

  Lucas Stout was the reason. Stout had a reputation as one of the best trail bosses around. He had a knack for finding water and grass, and got the cattle to market with few losses. Not only that, but he had a knack for overseeing men, too. No one ever gave Lucas Stout trouble. Not twice, they didn’t. Small wonder that hardly anything ever went wrong on any of his drives.

  “What’s that?” Ollie suddenly said.

  Chancy looked up.

  In the distance, riders had appeared, their silhouettes distorted by the heat haze. They were hard to make out until they came closer. There were seven, all told, and they spread out as they came.

  “Why, speak of the devil,” Ollie said.

  “What?” Chancy said. It galled him a trifle that his friend had the eyes of a hawk and could make out things a lot farther off than he could.

  “Injuns, by gosh.”

  Chancy sat straighter and placed his hand on his Remington. “Are you sure, pard?”

  “Well, they’ve got long hair and some of them have bows and their faces are kind of dark.” Ollie paused. “I never did savvy why we call them redskins, though. They’re not really red. But then we’re not really white, are we? We’re sort of pink.”

  “One of us should ride back and let Stout know,” Chancy suggested. They were riding point, well ahead of the fifteen hundred longhorns.

  “It might not be smart, only one of us staying,” Ollie said. “What if they’re hostile?”

  Chancy scowled. He’d never fought Indians. For that matter, he’d never fought anyone. Of the fourteen cowboys on the drive, not counting the cook, only two were any shucks with a six-shooter. Jelly Varnes shot two men once in a saloon fracas. And then there was Ben Riginaw. Gossip had it he’d killed at least three and wounded a few more. Maybe he had and maybe he hadn’t, but the matched pair of Remingtons he wore wasn’t for show.

  “I reckon you’re right,” Chancy said, drawing rein. “We hold our ground and see what they want.”

  Ollie followed suit. “Three of those redskins have bows. One has a lance. He’ll be the one to watch out for.”

  “Since when are you an expert on Indians?”

  “I know a lance is a lot bigger than an arrow,” Ollie said. “If that redskin raises his arm to throw, I’m plugging him.”

  “Listen to you,” Chancy said. “Wild Bill Hickok.”

  “So what if I’ve never shot anybody?” Ollie said. “I’m not about to let them stick me.”

  Chancy studied the Indians as they drew near. Truth was, he couldn’t tell one tribe from another. But he could tell old from young, and with one exception, the seven were long in the tooth. Over half had gray hair and were scrawny, to boot. Four wore leggings, the others a mix of white clothes that had seen better days. “They don’t look very fierce.”

  “Neither does a dog until it bites you.”

  Sometimes, Chancy reflected, his pard said the silliest things. “Keep your six-gun holstered. We don’t want to provoke them.”

  “Could be they’re already riled,” Ollie said. “Three of them have arrows nocked.”

  It could be caution on the part of the redskins, Chancy reflected, or it could portend trouble.

  “They lift those bows, we’d better shoot.”

  Chancy prayed it wouldn’t come to that. He plastered a smile on his face to show he was friendly, but none of the Indians returned the smile.

  The warriors drew rein about ten feet out. The youngest, in the middle, wore a black hat with a round crown and cradled a Sharps rifle in the crook of an elbow.

  Chancy held his left hand up, palm out, and said, “How do you do, gents? We’re friendly if you are.”

  “What makes you think they speak our lingo?” Ollie said. “They probably only know their own.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to try,” Chancy said.

  The warrior in the middle gestured sharply. “We want cows.”

  “How’s that again?” Ollie said.

  “We want cows,” the warrior repeated.

  “I don’t blame you,” Ollie said. “They beat pigs. Pigs don’t give milk and taste too salty. I’ve always liked cow meat more than pig meat. Chicken meat, too, for that matter. Snake meat I can do without. I won’t eat any critter that crawls.”

  The warrior cocked his head as if confused, then said, “One cow for each.” And he pointed at every single warrior in turn.

  “I don’t happen to have any cows on me at the moment,” Ollie said, and chuckled at his little joke.

  “No cows,” the warrior said, “you not go by.”

  “Well, that’s rude,” Ollie said. “You and your geezer friends should move out of the way before our outfit gets here. Some of them won’t be as nice to you as I am.”

  “Cows,” the warrior said, and thumbed back the hammer on his Sharps. “Or you be sorry.”

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